There’s a good chance you’ve experienced pre-selling one way or another. Maybe you backed a Kickstarter, or ordered a new book you were excited about. If you’ve ever bought tickets to a live event – a conference, workshop, or even a concert – you might consider that a kind of pre-selling as well!

In all cases, you’ve paid in advance, and without any way to try before you buy.

But now you’re gearing up to be the seller. On this side of the transaction, it feels a little different! This time it’s you asking people for their money before you’ve finished your product, with the promise that you’ll deliver it when it’s ready.

If you’ve already done the work to earn your audience’s trust and attention, and you’ve done the research to make a thing you’re pretty confident they’d want to buy, presales can be a great way to build momentum and excitement!

A few of the most popular upsides of pre-selling a product include:

• evidence that people want the thing you’re making, and the confidence you won’t launch something that nobody buys

• cash upfront that you can use to invest in producing the product itself, covering hard costs or simply buying more of your own time to work on delivering the product

• early feedback from your most motivated buyers that can help you improve your product before you stamp it as “done” and ready to ship

• social proof that you can use in your primary launch, from raw sales numbers to buyer testimonials, etc. your early buyers might even help spread the word about your product

These are some pretty big upsides, honestly! No surprise that pre-selling is a popular choice.

But it’s far less common to hear about the downsides of pre-selling.

TIP #1. HAVE A PLAN IN PLACE FOR IF YOU PRE-SELL AND DON’T MAKE MANY SALES.

Decide ahead of time if you have a minimum number of pre-sales in mind, and whether you want to refund the orders if you don’t reach that number, or press ahead making the thing with the hopes that enough people will buy it when it’s actually done and ready. Building a product knowing that not many people want it would squash my motivation, and also might not be the best business decision.”

Remember that pre-sales require MUCH more trust and desire from your prospective customer. They’re betting that you deliver what they want, and that they will still want it at some point in the future.

While high pre-sales numbers can be a positive indicator of future success (though not always, more on that in a second), low pre-sales numbers are NOT necessarily an indicator of future failure. Pre-sale success depends on trust and desire, but it also depends on the audience’s buying habits, the kind of product, the price point…there are lots of variables!

Will low pre-sales numbers hurt your motivation? If so, plan ahead.

The questions to ask yourself are:

• What numbers do you need to hit to feel like you’re on the right path?

• What will you do if you don’t hit those numbers? Refund, press forward, or something else?

TIP #2. CONSIDER HOW YOU DEAL WITH WORKING UNDER PRESSURE.

The pressure to deliver on your promise is very real…and If you don’t do well with that sort of pressure. The launch itself is exciting, the work… less so. I think it might be a bit like buying a domain name for a new idea – takes the wind out of my sails. The fun part is over, only the work remains.”

Personally, this is the one that gets me every time. It is a lesson in truly knowing yourself, and adjusting or planning accordingly.

The pressure that comes with pre-sales is pretty different from any other kind of pressure I’ve experienced. As mentioned, the work of pre-selling a product is exciting. Especially when it goes well!

But as more time passes after the last dollar hits your bank account, and you’re still working to deliver the product people paid for, that excitement wears off and is replaced with a sense of pressure to deliver on the promise you made.

For some people, that pressure can be motivating, but for almost everyone I’ve talked to (including myself) it does the opposite!

Delivering your pre-sales to paying customers is not the same as sprinting to hit a deadline, or pulling an all-nighter to finish a school project. This brand of pressure tends to come with feelings of guilt or dread. It can lead to burnout, demotivation, & ultimately giving up.

How you handle presale pressure is more like the head game of running a marathon or any other endurance activity. You have to remind yourself of the goal and persist, even on the days when you don’t feel like it.

This is a great time to practice professionalism, in a business sense.

TIP #3. RECOGNIZE THAT IT’S HARDER (THOUGH NOT IMPOSSIBLE) TO MAKE CHANGES TO YOUR PRODUCT & SCOPE.

Before launch, everything is malleable. You can rewrite the sales page, even after having people sign up. You can totally change your mind about what will be included, and ruthlessly cut scope to hit a deadline. That’s harder if you’ve pre-sold.

Those buyers bought a promise, whatever the words on the page (and the emails) promised them. It’s harder to walk that back.

The bigger and more complex your product is – especially the “first” version that you launch to paying customers – the bigger and more painful this lesson can bite you in the ass.

You’ve probably experienced the temptation to tell your prospective customers about all of the things your product will do…in the future. We hope to win over early adopters with these promises of features they’ll want and need. And when you pre-sell a product, it’s ALL promises.

Once you’ve taken a customer’s money based on a promise, you’re on the hook to deliver. As Dave mentions, changes to the promise are possible! But it’s also very common to feel like you’ve painted yourself into a corner. The fear of customers demanding refunds is real.

This might be one of the best reasons to keep the first version of your product as TINY as possible. In addition to shortening the path from pitching customers to shipping the first usable version of the product, pre-selling a tiny product will naturally reduce the number of things you can promise to make a sale.

TIP #4. BE AWARE THAT PRESALE SUCCESS CAN WARP YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF A “NORMAL” LAUNCH.

Nobody really talks about this, but if the presale goes really well, there’s a nonzero chance the actual launch won’t do as well, depending on how it’s structured. The presale is usually an open/closed launch (doors close after X days) and often a one-time discount, too. These are stronger incentives to buy than the typical “20% discount expires soon” sort of thing.

This leads to a sort of perfect storm where you can get a big swell of interest in the presale that can set high expectations for the real launch that don’t end up materializing. Just something to be aware of! It’s happened to me and a couple other course creators I know.

Think about who’s most likely to purchase during a pre-sale:

• People who you’ve helped in the past, and trust you to deliver again

• People who really want your product to exist

• Your biggest supporters who want you to succeed

People who are already most likely to buy.

Depending on the size of your reach and the degree of pain that a product solves for your audience, it’s possible for these highly motivated pre-sales to cannibalize some full-priced sales.

But don’t worry: if you use pre-sales strategically, you should be able to more than compensate for this outside possibility!

HOW TO DO YOUR PRE-SALE RIGHT

PRE-SALE STRATEGY #1: USE PRESALES FOR SOCIAL PROOF & MOMENTUM.

When pre-launching a new product, I might use a warm subset of my entire email list – usually a product-specific opt-in waiting list – to do a dry run of a launch or promotion before launching to our entire list.

In addition to making sure that our launch strategy works as expected with the most motivated people we can reach, those sales turn into social proof to our wider list! Depending on the context, our full public launch may include how customers have already bought during pre-sales, along with quotes & testimonials from those early adopters if we give them any form of early access.

Even if those early customers paid a little less, we can use their early adoption to strategically generate things other than revenue in the form of social proof, positive feedback, or testimonials, all of which will help us make more sales during a “full” launch.

PRE-SALE STRATEGY #2: TREAT YOUR PRE-SALES LIKE A VIP LIST, CAP YOUR PRE-SALE OFFERS.

When done poorly, artificial scarcity feels bad for everybody involved. But done for an honest reason that benefits the customer, it can feel like a VIP seat to a special experience!

If you treat your pre-sale like “VIP Access” and strategically limit the number of people who can buy, you can include relevant bonuses that might not make sense as your customer base gets bigger. Free consulting, concierge onboarding, and other things that “don’t scale” are perfect offers for the kind of people who’d be most likely to buy a pre-sale.

And since those special offers are limited you can naturally cap the offer with a certain number of seats, making it a distinct offer compared to your “main” launch.

PRE-SALE STRATEGY #3: COMBINE STRATEGIES 1 AND 2!

You can use your smaller, warmer waiting list to build momentum and social proof and ultimately sell out your “VIP Offers” more easily. Stack your smaller wins to create bigger wins!

PRE-SALE STRATEGY #4: USE AN EXTENDED PRE-SALE AS A “BETA” PERIOD

When I help launched one o my client video editing app, it only did one thing: remove silence from videos. He was pretty sure that people would want it – based on evidence from his Sales Safari research and his own experience creating video courses – but because the tool was so limited he wasn’t sure whether it would be useful enough.

This “how valuable is it?” uncertainty made it hard to confidently set a price, so we launched with a lower price to test the waters and get feedback.

A few months later, having gotten a ton of positive feedback and even some advice to “charge more!”, he redesigned and relaunched the app with a higher price, and was even able to use some of the feedback as social proof.

Just remember that regardless of using any of these strategies, pre-sales numbers aren’t a reliable indicator of “normal” sales numbers.

SO, SHOULD YOU PRE-SELL YOUR PRODUCT?

Well that all depends! On your situation, on how well you know yourself, and on what you’re willing to do to prepare for a successful pre-sale campaign.

If you know that leaving someone (or a bunch of someones) waiting on something fills you with anxiety and makes you less likely to do it your projects tend to grow out of control you have no idea who you’re gonna sell this thing to

…then pre-selling might not be the best fit for you/your biz/this product/right now. That’s not to say you should never do a pre-sale, but these signs suggest you might be playing on hard mode and you’re better off setting yourself up for a win through other means.

On the other hand, if you: - Have or can build good habits for finishing projects and shipping by a deadline… Invest in doing your research to make a product that people actually want… Ruthlessly keep your product’s release scope extremely tight and small (with a well-designed Backwards Plan)… Have a reliable way to reach an audiencewho trusts you…

…then pre-selling can be a powerful tool for growing your confidence and bringing in early revenue.

1. Come up with idea!

2. Build idea!

3. Put idea online…

4. Wait for sales…

5. …wait for sales…

6. Double down and try to figure out “product-market fit”, in other words: Who wants to buy this?

Over the years, I’ve watched countless friends & acquaintances get stuck in this process. If you make it to Step 6, you’re an outlier. Most folks get stuck between Steps 1 and 3. That’s where the worst doubt & procrastination (a result of fear) set in. Some folks have been re-running Steps 1 - 3 over & over for years.

If you do make it to Step 6, though, you come face to face with the high probability of Hidden Step 7: Give Up, wherein you struggle to find a repeatable source of sales… and can’t.

Lots of strategies have come out to “fix” this process. These strategies fall into two camps:

1. Get you past Step 3: Ship The Damn Thing more often, faster (“Lean”)

2. Hopefully carry you from Step 6: Flail to actual sales, instead of the nearly inevitable Step 7: Give Up (“Customer Development”)

Oofta. These approaches are both flawed – they start off by accepting the validity of the original process, and trying to modify it.

THE REAL TRICK IS TO BYPASS THIS PROCESS ENTIRELY

Because the original “process” (such as it is, formed of unconscious wishes and unicorn spit) is not valid. Not in the slightest. It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Let’s not waste time polishing a turd.

In Solosuite, we share better ways to do this. And today I’m going to teach it to you. I used to think of this as a process…but it’s nothing so linear or fancy. It’s really a set of questions, and techniques and tools for answering them.

YOU NEED TO ANSWER JUST 3 SIMPLE QUESTIONS

And these will form the backbone of your success. Yes, really. You just need to know…

1. Who am I serving?

2. What do they need/want, and are they ready to buy?

3. How can I reach them and persuade them?

These are big questions, true. But they are simple. And every time you answer one of them, your path will become clearer & clearer.

The secret sauce is that, if you work on them diligently, each answer leads to the next. This approach builds momentum.

And you start it before you ever even think of building a product. You don’t ask, “Who would buy this?” you ask, “Who wants to buy something, and what is it?” You start with the customer first.

1. WHO ARE YOU SERVING?

You can’t ask “What do they want?” without having a “they” in mind. But, while there’s all kinds of startup chatter about “niche selection” and how critical it is, this step is not a big deal. Repeat: NOT a big deal.

In previous editions of 30x500, Alex and I made a big mistake. We allowed our students, in this stage of class, to spin out of control. Faced with such a momentous choice, they came down with existential angst and refused to make a decision. In short, they ground to a halt at Step 1.

NOW I SHAKE PEOPLE AND CRY, “DON’T GET FANCY! FANCY EQUALS DEATH!”

I tell them: Are you a Ruby developer? Then serve Ruby developers. Are you a UX designer? Serve UX designers.

This isn’t a choice you have to live with forever. But you have to choose now and move forward now. And you can’t afford to pick far afield — or even near-afield.

YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO GET CREATIVE

When you start a new business, you start a vicious battle with entropy. Inertia, habit, circumstance – they’re all conspiring to end your product ambitions before you make a single dollar. You can’t afford to throw away even a single advantage, and that’s exactly what you do if you choose an audience you don’t belong to, with all the connections & rapport that means.

In other words: You’re being chased by a hungry bear. Drop your fancy camping gear, or the bear will eat you.

2. WHAT DO THEY NEED/WANT, AND ARE READY TO BUY?

And here is where the real value starts to happen. Let’s say you’re a Ruby developer so (\shakes finger\) you’re going to serve Ruby developers. Now you need to research them, to find out what Ruby developers need, want, and are ready to buy.

You cannot rely on what your gut tells you. Cuz your gut is an uneducated fool who only just woke up… your gut has only been in the community, not studying the community.

You do research like this:

1. Find out where Ruby developers hang out online.

2. Lurk with a purpose.

3. Write down pain points, beliefs, worldviews, complaints, questions, struggles, products, desires.

4. Do this a lot…10, 20, 30 hours, before you set out to try to create a product.

And once you’ve gathered a good base set of data, you:

1. Organize it, distill it, label the patterns.

2. Use these to brainstorm nearly infinite product concepts.

Hmmm…”organizing data.” Does that sound like the wild thrill of the idea hunt? No. Are you writing code or slinging pixels? No. But where have those got you before?

THESE BORING STEPS CAN SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS

As Edison once remarked, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” The 30x500 approach has a distinct whiff of overalls and manure-shoveling about it. (Although, frankly, if you love making money, you’ll find it enjoyable. I love it.)

What’s amazing about these particular overalls is this:

Take a look at the following issues. You’ve probably experienced them before. Most folks would tell you, “Oh, that’s just what it’s like when you ‘do a startup.’” But, like the bone-headed default process I talked about earlier, there’s nothing normal or natural about them:

Will anyone want this? Use the 30x500 approach, and you can say: Yes! And feel secure in saying so — because you didn’t start with an idea, and then hope people want it, you started with what people wanted and then made it.

They need it, but do they want it? Start with data and you can know, by observing their buying behavior. Do they just bitch and never buy? You can tell, by studying them.

I dunno…I’m afraid… While research can’t solve fear, you can learn to stop fear in its tracks by asking yourself, “Where’s the evidence?” And because you will have based your decisions on research, you can revisit it and prove to yourself that your decisions were sound, just like a warm cuddly blanket and flashlight in the dark.

How can I sell it to people? Do things the “boring” way and you’ll have the data you need to speak your customers’ language, talk about their pains the way they do, and what they want to achieve, too.

How do I get all this in front of potential customers? Again, do your research first, and you’ll be prepared. You’ll already know the places where your target audience hangs out. You can reach them there. And you know what they’re interested in, what they struggle with, and that gives you a springboard for making content that will attract them.

Which brings us to the next and final question…

3. HOW CAN I REACH MY POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS AND PERSUADE THEM TO BUY?

Fact: If you can market effectively, you can make sales before you build the product (pre-sales). But if you ship a product and have no way to market it, you can’t make any sales at all.

And that’s why, in the 30×500 approach, you figure out your marketing before you ever set pen to paper, code to Textmate, or pixels to Photoshop. The opposite, in fact, of the way most people do it.

It’s not much extra work, either, because every step of the approach so far has been channeling you towards a successful marketing strategy:

1. You’ll already know where to find your potential customers (because you’ve already been studying them for ages)

2. You’ll already know what they want, need, read, and share (because you’ve already been studying them for ages)

Isn’t that amazing? The 30×500 questions tie it all up with a shiny ribbon.

SO, ASK YOURSELF THE 3 QUESTIONS…

Because if you can answer them — if you do the work to truly answer them, from data — the answers will lead you to…

1. build a product paying customers already want…

2. gather the ingredients needed to persuade them to buy, and…

3. learn how to get their eyeballs on your marketing in the first place.

Voila. All you’ve got to do is tug on that ribbon (hard!), and it’ll unfold into a beautiful, profitable product.

Skip any of the steps, fail to answer any of the questions, though, and what you’ll have is a tangled mess. A mess you can’t escape by “pivoting” or “getting out of the building”.

IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE?

Yes, that really is the heart of it. That’s how I’ve made all the money I’ve made so far in the product business (which, frankly, is a lot).

But, like chess, the rules are simple…but it can take a lifetime to master the game. I should know — this is the approach we teach in Solosuite, and we’re currently on the 4th or 5th iteration of how we teach it. We’ve gone from telling students to “Go out there and look for this stuff in forums” to giving step-by-step, systematic instructions on howto skim and mine a forum, how to organize your findings, how to turn that into product concepts and how to turn all of that into marketing material, with rubrics and instructions.

Yep, it’s a challenge, but if you’re game, the rewards are intense. Intensely profitable.